-Paulo Freire
The standard model of learning in much western education for the last century and more has been that the teacher dispenses knowledge, often in the form of a lecture, which students are supposed to absorb. This model is flawed for two key reasons. For one thing, it is a poor way for students to understand and retain information--students tend to absorb something well enough and long enough to be able to repeat it for a test, and no further. Furthermore, the model sets up a highly imbalanced power dynamic between student and teacher, in which the teacher is the all-knowing and powerful dispenser of knowledge, and the students are the lowly know-nothings who rely solely on the grace of the teacher to get along in the world. This power relationship is an inappropriate and ineffective way to prepare good citizens in a democracy--it does not produce the Educated Person.
Good learning, on the other hand, has the following qualities:
Constructive
Good learning takes place when students construct knowledge. By "construct," I mean that students are guided toward the discovery of facts and skills--they do not receive them from on high, but are helped to build them in their minds on their own. By constructing knowledge, students can both understand and retain it, because constructing knowledge is (1) inherently interesting, promoting retention, and (2) requires understanding the bits and pieces of how things work.
An example of constructed learning: instead of memorizing the Pythagorean theorem, students draw right triangles, construct squares on each side of their triangles, and discover that the area of the two smaller squares is the same as the larger square. The students are engaged in active rather than passive learning (doing instead of hearing), and are allowed to make a discovery on their own rather
than having an idea handed to them.
 |
| Source |
Participative
Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire called the standard education outlined above the "banking model," because it imagines education as though the teacher's job were simply to deposit knowledge in students' heads like money in a bank. He pointed out that this model tends to reproduce oppressive structures in society (in which people with too much power retain that power, and those without power are taught to accept their powerlessness), whereas a truly just and democratic education would teach the oppressed to recognize and disrupt their oppression.
Democratic education must thus be participative,* by which I mean it must have an element of give and take between teacher and student. Students must have an engaging teacher who cares about them--this is a key element of Good Teaching. They must also have input into the materials taught, the direction of the class and its activities.
Education professor Brian D. Schulz found that by allowing students to direct their energy toward a serious problem in their lives--in this case, the incredibly run-down state of their school--they actually learned in more depth and were more engaged than their peers, and they often reached well beyond their expected ability level. His description of this process in the book Spectacular Things Happen Along the Way provides an excellent example of the positive effects of a highly participative, democratic classroom.
*Participative here refers in part to a leadership style described by researcher Kurt Lewin in the early 20th century as part of research into the effectiveness of different kinds of leadership. It means a leadership style in which the leader is a guide who makes decisions and sets boundaries, but also accepts and incorporates much input from the group. The other two styles he described were authoritarian and delegative, both of which Lewin found to be generally less effective. Read more about this research here.
No comments:
Post a Comment